Comparison
Liveness probevsStartup probe
Liveness probe
the orchestrator asks whether the process is wedged and restarts the container when it stops answering.
A health check whose failure means "kill and restart this instance". It should test only whether the process itself is stuck, never whether dependencies are reachable. A liveness probe that checks the database will restart every instance in the fleet during a database incident, turning a degradation into an outage.
Full entry →Startup probe
the application takes ninety seconds to warm up, and this is what stops the health checker killing it at thirty.
A health check that runs only during start-up, suspending the other probes until the process reports ready for the first time. It exists to solve one specific bug: a slow-starting application in a restart loop because its liveness check began before it was ever alive. Without it the only fix is a liveness delay long enough to also delay detection of genuine hangs for the rest of the workload's life.
Full entry →